Society for Seventeenth-Century Music Thirteenth Annual Meeting Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois 14­17 April 2005

ABSTRACTS

Index of presentations

Candace Bailey (North Carolina Central University), “English ‘Baroque’ Style and the Politics of Change” Marie-Louise Catsalis (North Carolina Central University), “In the Calm Evening Air: Music and Text of the Solo Serenata” Esther Criscuola de Laix (University of California at Berkeley), “Culture and Ceremony in the Wedding Motets of Jacob Praetorius” Stefan Eckert (Northwestern University), “Musicalische Vorstellung einiger Biblischer Historien (1700) - Johann Kuhnau’s Conception of Affect as Form and Expression” Patricia Firca (The University of Chicago), “Felice Ottavia: Taming the Vindictive Queen of L’incoronazione di Poppea” Catherine Gordon-Seifert (Providence University), “Rhetoric and Expression in the Mid Seventeenth-Century French Air” Robert A. Green (Indiana University), “Reflections of Changing Public Tastes: Lambert’s Revisions to His 1689 Airs” Douglas L. Ipson (The University of Chicago), “Opera on Canvas: The Paintings of Il Padovanino and Venetian Opera of the 1640s” Naomi Matsumoto (Goldsmiths’ College, University of London), “Monteverdi and the Madness of Iro: Asylum Seeking and a Return to Homeland?” Tim O’Brien (University of Minnesota), “’When Conquering Beauty Fills that Heavenly Sphear’: A Reappraisal of Allegory in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen” Mary Paquette-Abt (Wayne State University), “Subtexts: The Dedication as Source in Early Seventeenth-Century Roman Music Prints” Colleen Reardon (Binghamton University), “Scrambled Eggs and Hams: Theatrical Music in Siena at the End of the Seventeenth Century” Andrew Schultze (Ars Musica Chicago), “Il pianto di Rodomonte: Creating a Performance of Abbatini’s cantata drammatica” Hendrik Schulze (Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Salzburg), “Giovanni Faustini’s & Francesco Cavalli’s La virtu de’ strali d’Amore (1642) as a Contribution to Contemporary Operatic Debate” Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz-Landau), “'Fu cantato un poemetto graziosissimo': New Light on the Rise of the oratorio volgare in Rome” Beverly Stein (California State University), “The Triumph of Jephte’s Daughter: Religious Symbolism, Gender and Role Exchange in Carissimi’s Jephthe” Beth Szczepanski (Ohio State University), “Il Nerone Impasticciato: The Lover and the Tyrant in the Characterization of Nero in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea” Stefanie Tcharos (University of California at Santa Barbara), “Revisiting Arcadia: The Ideology of Nostalgia and the Problem of Musical Drama” Andrew H. Weaver (Northwestern University), “The Emperor’s Voice: Style, Structure and Meaning in a Motet from the Habsburg Court of Ferdinand III (1637- 57)” Sarah F. Williams (Northwestern University), “'What devil’s Pater noster mumbles she?’: The Sounds & Music of Witchcraft in Early-Modern English Broadside Balladry” Jessica Wiskus (Duquesne University), “Chromatic Dialectic: A Phenomenological Approach to Louis Couperin” ROME AND ITS MUSIC

Subtexts: The Dedication as Source in Early Seventeenth­Century Roman Music Prints Mary Paquette­Abt (Wayne State University)

Inscriptions in seventeenth­century music prints are usually noted for their addressees, but scholarly perceptions of them as puff pieces constrained by rhetorical convention has sometimes diverted attention from the contemporary cultural commentary they contain. New ways of reading such texts, albeit ones with different purposes, have been approached in the work of Tim Carter, Susan Lewis and others, with valuable contributions from Raimund Redeker for a slightly earlier repertory. These readings shift attention to the writer—usually the composer—and the insights that critical reading can offer about contemporary music and context. I believe such texts in early seventeenth century Rome offer special insights into the music profession, seen through its practitioners, particularly figures less well­known to us, who were active professionally and published in large numbers, and formed the backbone of Roman musical life in the era. The particular evidence I use is from the dedications to the series of anthologies of sacred and secular vocal music compiled by Fabio Costantini from the 1610s through the 1630s, the only such series with Roman composers and repertory published during that time. His dedications are as varied in tone and content as are the character and personalities of his dedicatees, but consistent throughout is the voice of the author, which grows bolder with the passage of years, particularly concerning changes in the music profession. If we look past Costantini’s more conventional uses of dedicatory language, he becomes an increasing presence in his texts, reflecting on his own endeavors as composer, compiler, performer, and director. When viewed in the larger context of Costantini’s biography, the specific meanings of his texts emerge. Because his career is typical in many ways of the Roman musician in this era, his words can be read as contemporary commentary on Roman musical culture. Yet this commentary comes from a quarter different than that of often­quoted contemporary cultural critics, among them the aristocratic amateurs Vincenzo Giustianiani or Pietro Della Valle, whose opinions have influenced our understanding of the era. This reading of evidence from the profession also indicates the potential of pursuing this avenue of research within a systematic study of music printing in early seventeenth­century Rome. Return to top

'Fu cantato un poemetto graziosissimo': New Light on the Rise of the Oratorio volgare in Rome Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz­Landau, Germany) It is a widespread opinion that the oratorio, coming from Roman antecedents, had fully developed by the mid­seventeenth century and that the rise of the oratorio volgare is primarily connected with the practice of oratorio­music at the oratory of the church Santa Maria in Vallicella at Rome. But an examination of sources from about 1625­1630, such as oratorio­librettos by Giovanni Ciampoli, Ottavio Tronsarelli and Giulio Rospigliosi, or oratorio music by Kapsberger, sheds new light to the dark early history of the genre. Their conception of the oratorio was rather different from that of Anerio's "Teatro," as well as from the mid­century type at the Vallicella. Oratorios were written for festivities at Roman palaces from about 1625 on, and they seem to have had an important influence on the oratorio music at Roman churches and oratories. The new thesis will be presented that the emergence of the oratorio volgare in Rome is essentially to be seen in the context of the artistic­religious program of the early reign of Pope Urban VIII. (1623­44). There is evidence that Urban saw in the oratorio a new instrument of combining sacred poetic art and self­representation, as he was to some years later, from 1631 on, in the Rospigliosi operas promoted by the Barberini. Return to top

The Triumph of Jephte’s Daughter: Religious Symbolism, Gender and Role Exchange in Carissimi’s Jephthe Beverly Stein (California State University)

Jepthe’s daughter has no name and occupies only six verses in the book of Judges. But in his Jephte, Counter­Reformation composer and Jesuit master of persuasion Giacomo Carissimi transforms the unnamed young woman into the oratorio’s hero, surpassing in importance even her father, the military hero who rescued Israel from destruction. While musicologists have tended to focus on the literal meaning of the story (the human tragedy of the vow) and its musical and rhetorical expression, the deeper religious symbolism of the oratorio has gone completely unnoticed. This paper will explore how and why Carissimi accorded such distinction to this particular female character. The famous mutatio toni at the midpoint marks not only a change of affect but, more importantly, the point at which the daughter begins to usurp the dramatic and symbolic role of her father, represented through explicit musical shifts from father to daughter at three levels of scale. The small­scale textual shift in Jephte’s "Heu mihi" lament resonates musically through tonal descent, when Jephte refers to himself, and ascent when he refers to his daughter. The role reversal becomes even clearer after Filia offers herself in sacrifice, and Jephte simply parrots back his daughter’s previous statement. The father’s character then disappears, while his daughter wrings every heart with her moving lament. The daughter of Jephte is no ordinary woman: she is, according to Augustine contemporary Quodvultdeus and others, a prefiguration of Christ, and it is for this reason that Carissimi raises her up as the oratorio’s hero. She has been seen by writers such as Isidore of Pelusium as manly and strong, after the manner of virgins whose pure state endowed them with the physical and moral strength of men. Carissimi suggests such a view when Jephte falls into lament, a feminine utterance, while his daughter takes over his role as leader, making decisions and commanding nature to obey her as her father formerly commanded his troops; they not only switch roles, but genders. The apotheosis of her character over his may echo the shifting emphasis of the Counter­Reformation from militancy to triumph of the Church. Return to top

In the Calm Evening Air: Music and Text of the Solo Serenata Marie­Louise Catsalis (North Carolina Central University)

In the eyes of modern scholars, the well­known genre of the solo cantata has tended to overshadow, if not subsume, the less­known solo serenata. Yet, in fact, composers and poets did distinguish solo serenatas from cantatas, often in the same manuscript. In the words of Carolyn Gianturco, "the terms opera, oratorio and cantata [were] used with assurance and familiarity. In each case it meant something specific" (Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 1994). But what about the serenata? (Here I restrict the focus to the solo serenata as distinct from larger­scale, multi­ voiced works.) What did the seventeenth­century composer, patron, or indeed audience member understand by this designation? The role of the poet in providing the composer with the initial structure of the work deserves emphasis. Many common features can be discerned from a study of works bearing this title. For example, the use of obbligato instruments is typical, whereas continuo accompaniment is by far the norm for the solo cantata. The frequent use of Petrarchan textual imagery, in itself widespread in this period, points to another tell­tale element: the incipit. The often­used "Hor che ..." incipit, together with its nocturnal setting, is derived from Petrarch’s Sonnet 164: "Hor che’l ciel et la terra e’l vento tace" ("Now that the heaven and the earth and the wind are silent…"). It has deeper roots in Dido’s soliloquy in Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid. With these musical and poetic considerations in mind, analysis of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Hor che l’aurato nume (ca. 1690) will make it possible to stake a claim for the solo serenata as a genre in its own right.

LECTURE­RECITAL Il pianto di Rodomonte Creating a Performance of Abbatini’s Cantata drammatica Andrew Schultze (Chicago, IL)

This lecture­recital explores Antonio Maria Abbatini’s 1633 "dramatic cantata" Il pianto di Rodomonte and will include excerpts from it performed live by soloists from Ars Musica Chicago. Antonio Maria Abbatini (ca 1600­79) was an important composer and pedagogue. His surviving works include liturgical music, operas, vocal chamber music, Il pianto di Rodomonte, a lively autobiography (in verse) and a counterpoint tutor. Among his students were the notable composers Giovanni Paolo Colonna, Antonio [Pietro]Cesti, the castrato Domenico Dal Pane and hundreds of other musicians from Rome to Peru (according to the Autobiography). While Abbatini’s present renown rests on his later operatic achievements, Il pianto, his only published secular work, remains obscure. This lecture­recital will present a performance of excerpts from this significant work, the lecture will focus on questions of performance practice encountered in its re­creation. Il piano di Rodomonte, published in Orvieto with a dedication to the "Accademici Assorditi" by Abbatini’s protégé Pietro Antonio Ubaldoni, is for four vocal soloists; Rodomonte, bass; Isabella, soprano; Romito, tenor; and Cupido, soprano; and basso continuo. The text, by one of the Assorditi, is drawn from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Compositionally Rodomonte is transitional in nature and contains much information relative to the development of the Roman School, specifically to the recitative, arioso and the strophic aria. Of special interest is a strophic aria, a brindisi for Rodomonte with written out embellishments. The lecture will include a formal and harmonic analysis and information about Abbatini’s life and times drawn from his autobiography and other writings and studies of his work and times by Margaret Murata, Galliano Ciliberti, Karin Andrae, John Walter Hill, David Fuller and others. Among contemporary sources consulted vis­à­vis issues of performance practice are Le nuove musiche by Giulio Caccini (1602), the Syntagma musicum by Michael Praetorius (1619), La selva di varii passaggi by Francesco Rognoni (1620) and Christoph Bernhard’s Von der Sing­Kunst oder Manier, Penna (1672); and Abbatini’s own counterpoint tutor, the Lezioni accademiche (1663­ 68).

MUSIC AND THEATER

Revisiting Arcadia: The Ideology of Nostalgia and the Problem of Musical Drama Stefanie Tcharos (University of California, Santa Barbara)

The difficulties in delineating the role of music in the context of the Academy of Arcadians are well known to scholars of late baroque Rome. There are few excerpts from Arcadian literature that deal directly with music; most are authored by the society’s custodian, Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, or by his renowned Arcadian associates, Muratori, Gravina, and others. We may gain limited information about music in the Academy from records of payments made by patrons to musicians or composers. Yet in the end, we know little about how the Arcadians integrated music into their ideological vision. My presentation revisits a passage in Arcadian literature in which musical and poetic composition takes center stage, Crescimbeni’s account of a competitive exchange between the poet Giovan Battista Felice Zappi and the composer Alessandro Scarlatti. I consider the moment in the larger context of Crescimbeni’s L’Arcadia (1708), the text from which the passage derives. My study explores how this narrative fits the author’s larger project to create a pastoral fantasy—a fantasy that uses nostalgia as an ideological tool to fictionalize the present as an Arcadian past. Using this discussion as a framework, I consider the juxtaposition of past and present in the Arcadian cultural construct. Specifically, I explore the relationship between this phenomenon and current practices of setting pastoral drama to music. I speculate why a detailed description of musical drama, which might consider more explicitly how contemporary music can be "pastoral" or "ancient," is suggestively lacking. Return to top

"When Conquering Beauty Fills that Heavenly Sphear": A Reappraisal of Allegory in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen Tim O’Brien (University of Minnesota)

Although scholars have devoted attention to potential allegorical readings of Purcell’s major stage works, The Fairy Queen is not generally regarded as a political allegory. Scholars have identified a few isolated political references, but no analysis of the opera has offered a comprehensive allegorical reading. This study asserts that contextualization of The Fairy Queen in terms of the literary traditions on which it draws and the political climate in which it was performed reveals that the work was clearly designed as a cogent dramatic allegory. Approaching the drama both in terms of its formal design and its relationships to its principal literary sources (specifically, seventeenth­century fairy literature and the Stuart court masque) I argue that The Fairy Queen’s adapter deliberately situated it within a literary tradition explicitly associated with allegory and carefully designed it with the purpose of advancing a complex allegorical program. Evaluating the opera’s dramatic, visual, and musical images with respect to the events and iconography surrounding the Revolution of 1688, I assert that The Fairy Queen was intended and would have been understood as a carefully veiled Jacobite satire of the Williamite monarchy. This assertion ultimately reevaluates The Fairy Queen’s role in the complex relationships obtaining between art and the politics of religious succession in Purcell’s London and corroborates other studies of allegory in the composer’s stage works.

Opera on Canvas: The Paintings of Il Padovanino and Venetian Opera of the 1640s Douglas L. Ipson (The University of Chicago)

Although many important iconographic studies of opera have appeared in recent years, none has fully explored the interconnection of painting in the Seicento and opera. This paper proposes a direct relationship between several Venetian operas of the late 1630s through the 1640s and contemporary paintings by Alessandro Varotari, called Il Padovanino (1588–1648).While no documentary evidence linking Padovanino to a specific opera production has surfaced, a comparison of Padovanino’s late paintings to Venetian operas from approximately the same period does reveal a remarkable number of correspondences. Not only do many paintings and operas feature the same themes and characters, they share similar attitudes toward their subjects. These attitudes betray the influence of the Accademia degli Incogniti, with which Padovanino and virtually every librettist of the period enjoyed a close association. The paper explores three points of intersection. The correspondence between Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) of Monteverdi and Badoaro and Padovanino’s Penelope Brings the Bow of Ulysses to Her Suitors has already been noticed by many, while another—that between Ercole in Lidia (1645) by Rovetta and Bisaccioni and the two versions of Hercules and Omphale—has gone unremarked until now. Finally, the paper attempts to understand Poppea, that most enigmatic of opera heroines, by comparing her to a pair of no less enigmatic Padovanino Venuses. Intended as a rapprochement across disciplinary divides, this paper seeks above all to provide a clearer understanding of how the Venetian opera­ spectacles of the 1640s relate to each other and to their cultural context, by viewing them from a previously neglected but fascinating perspective, that of contemporary painting.

Scrambled Eggs and Hams: Theatrical Music in Siena at the End of the Seventeenth Century Colleen Reardon (Binghamton University)

The performance of theatrical music in Siena depended on several different kinds of patronage, none of which has yet been fully explored. The Medici governors who ruled the city from 1627 to 1731 sometimes strove to promote musical theater. Two academies, the Rozzi and the Intronati, began to mount operas by the late 1660s. The Collegio Tolomei regularly presented oratorios beginning in the 1680s. And aristocratic families such as the Chigi sponsored theatrical performances. Recently discovered letters in the Florentine State Archives help shed light on musical theater in Siena at the end of the Seicento. Between 1697­1700, the Sienese aristocrat Fabio Spannocchi wrote regular missives to Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici, the city’s largely absent governor. Spannocchi was a musical dilettante who was intimately involved with at least one theatrical project. His letters document the academic, personal, and class rivalries that plagued the productions, the misadventures of various singers engaged to perform, and the financial, logistical, and artistic problems involved in mounting opera and oratorio. They also demonstrate that despite these difficulties, opera was staged in Siena more frequently than one might imagine in a small city, sometimes by hitherto unknown local groups such as the Academy of Good Humor. Most importantly, the letters reveal the interdependence of patronage systems in a small city. Sienese impresarios succeeded in producing opera independently because they learned how to exploit to the fullest the pool of local talent, their academies’ assets, the prerogatives claimed by the aristocratic class, and the resources of the ruling Medici. Return to top

RHETORIC, AFFECT AND STYLE English "Baroque" Style and the Politics of Change Candace Bailey (North Carolina Central University)

The influence of the keyboard music of Orlando Gibbons on later generations is a topic ripe for consideration, for there can be no doubt that his legacy continued long after his death in 1625, and I will propose that it is in his oeuvre that we can locate the beginnings of English "Baroque" style. One of the areas that best demonstrates his impact on future generations is the fantasia, for Gibbons’s fantasias were clearly the most popular representations of that genre copied in English keyboard sources after 1620. Perhaps surprisingly, the transmission of his fantasias did not initially lie within the London­Oxford area, but rather some distance removed from it. In fact, during the 1630s and 40s, the main proponents of the English organ tradition continued in the south and west, situated around a group of composers active from Bristol to Exeter to Canterbury. This paper will examine how a hitherto unrecognized group of composers—ones closely tied to each other not only by musical tradition but also by philosophical, political, and religious beliefs—are responsible for the evolution of the English organ tradition in the mid­seventeenth century. The intricate web woven by these men kept alive a tradition that until now was thought to have lain dormant, only to be resurrected with the Restoration in 1660 with the works of Christopher Gibbons and Matthew Locke. Quite to the contrary, new evidence shows that this tradition never died nor was it reborn, rather it continued throughout the tumultuous years of the 1630s­50s, carried on in less conspicuous areas of the country where such a style flourished far from the prying eyes of London. New editions of this repertory, discoveries of new manuscripts (even within the past year), and my piecing together the provenance and transmission of the music indicate that our previous interpretation of English "Baroque" keyboard music beginning only after the Restoration is inherently incorrect and will be reconsidered here, alongside recognition of a stable, progressive tradition that endured because it was supported by extra­musical factors, much like musical repertories elsewhere in Europe.

Musicalische Vorstellung einiger Biblischer Historien (1700) Johann Kuhnau’s Conception of Affect as Form and Expression Stefan Eckert (Northwestern University)

Between 1689 and 1700, Johann Kuhnau (1660­1722) published four collections of keyboard music containing 14 suites and 14 sonatas. In the preface to the last collection, Musicalische Vorstellung einiger Biblischer Historien, which consists of six sonatas that programmatically deal with biblical themes, Kuhnau extensively addresses the role of musical affect in the context of instrumental music. Although Kuhnau precedes each individual sonata with a lengthy description of its biblical content and identifies specific programmatic moments through annotations in the music, he worries in the preface that his audience might misunderstand his intentions. In the preface, Kuhnau distinguishes between music that expresses a specific affect and music that moves the audience to experience a specific affect. The former is linked to musical expression by means of word painting and imitation of real­life sounds (for example, bird songs), while the latter is concerned with musical realizations of an affect, quasi as a musical analogy that is embedded into the structure of a work. Kuhnau further discusses the role of musical affect in relation to sense perception and musical composition in his novels Des klugen und thörichten Gebrauchs der fünf Sinnen (On the Clever and Foolish use of the Five Senses) and Der musicalische Quacksalber (The Musical Charlatan). Based on Kuhnau’s writings, I demonstrate how the musico­dramatic unfolding of the sonatas contains both aspects of the affect, and how both are embedded into the musical structure.

Chromatic Dialectic: A Phenomenological Approach to Louis Couperin Jessica Wiskus (Duquesne University)

Chromatic juxtapositions employed within the Préludes of Louis Couperin defy analysis from either modal or tonal paradigms. And so when approaching this music, we are uncomfortably snatched from the task of determining "what" the piece represents (i.e., what paradigm does the work approximate), to the task of exploring "how" the piece is experienced. The methodology that we must employ, therefore, is that of phenomenology, and our guiding question for a phenomenological analysis will be: "How do we experience Couperin’s chromatic juxtapositions as coherence?" Turning to Couperin’s Prélude [M3], we begin by investigating musical practice of the time. A brief exploration of the hexachord system by means of reference to treatises of the seventeenth­century, including those that proposed revisions (Mersenne, la Voye, Delair, and Denis), highlights the effect of chromatic oscillation as an essential characteristic of the hexachord system. Then we develop a reductional analysis of Couperin’s Prélude—focused upon his use of chromaticism as an expressive device—that enables one to follow Couperin’s points of oscillation as governing structures. This analysis discloses Couperin’s use of oscillation, not as an unquestioned embodiment of the ancient hexachord system, but as a reference to the effect of the system in accordance with the proposed revisions of his theorist colleagues. By transposing the effect of oscillation from the surface level to a structural interpretation, Couperin generates a "chromatic dialectic"—a balanced unity of opposites. It is the unity inherent to the chromatic dialectic that enables us to experience Couperin’s chromatic juxtapositions as coherence.

Reflections of Changing Public Tastes: Lambert’s Revisions to His 1689 Airs Robert A. Green (Indiana University)

Michel Lambert was regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest composer of airs in late­seventeenth­century France. He was heavily involved in court musical activities from 1650 until his death in 1689. He published two collections of his works. Les Airs de Monsieur Lambert (1660) solidified his reputation, but the Airs à II. III. et IV. parties avec la basse­continue (1689), the most ambitious publication of its kind in the period, is a summation of his contribution to the music of his time. Thirty­two of the eighty airs found in the latter edition had been previously published anonymously in two­part versions between 1661 and 1688 in the annual anthologies prepared by the Ballard family of printers Airs de différents autheurs. Their composition dates are not known, but given the Ballards’ and the public’s thirst for new music, they were likely composed within a year of publication. Although Ballard’s readings differ from the 1689 version; although it is unclear that he obtained his versions directly from Lambert, a comparison between them and those of the 1689 edition reveal large­scale changes that tell us much about the evolution of Lambert’s musical style. Changes in rhythm and form, as well as increased harmonic sophistication, show substantial rethinking of the means of expressing the poetic text and the relative importance of the individual poetic lines, mirroring the changes in style then taking place in France. The 1689 edition affords a dynamic view of the French air as it reaches its culmination at the end of the seventeenth century. Return to top

LECTURE­RECITAL Rhetoric and Expression in the Mid Seventeenth­Century French Air: A Rationale for Compositional Style and Performance Catherine Gordon­Seifert (Providence College) with Elisabeth Belgrano (Ensemble Éclatante Amarante), soprano

Although scholars have generally recognized that the union of music and rhetoric is a distinct feature of seventeenth­century music, little attention has been given to how rhetorical principles influenced compositional style and performance practices in France. This lecture­recital applies a rhetorical analysis to the most abundantly cultivated genre of vocal music before Lully’s tragédies en musique: the solo song or air (1650­1670). The lecture demonstrates how, in practice, lyric poetry and the rhetorical devices used therein provided a basis for the expression of affect, which in turn served as a rationale for the creation and performance of this repertory. The presentation begins with a brief review of rhetorical theory and music as interpreted in French treatises on rhetoric, poetics, and music. The analysis is organized according to the three components of rhetoric most relevant to an analysis of the airs. 1) Inventio, the identification and portrayal of topics, concerns how composers represented the affects most commonly named in the texts and their correspondence with descriptions of passions given by Descartes and rhetoricians Bary, Lamy, Grimarest, and Bretteville; 2) Dispositio, the organization of expressions, regards how composers conceived their musical settings as imitations of impassioned discourse. Particular attention is given to the function of the doubles or ornamented second verses; 3) Actio (with reference to Bacilly and Grimarest) addresses performance practices, including pronunciation (syllabic quantity), ornamentation, gestures, and accompanimental procedures. Ultimately, the presentation shows that while song­texts defined the structure of the air, rhetorical principles imparted to composers a means of realizing the dominant aesthetic of the period: to captivate the auditor by moving the passions.

ITALIAN OPERA AT MID­CENTURY

Monteverdi and the "Madness" of Iro: Asylum Seeking and a Return to Homeland? Naomi Matsumoto (Goldsmiths’ College, University of London)

In 1989 Ellen Rosand published a searching analysis of the character of Iro in Monteverdi/Badoaro’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (1641). That analysis not only reversed traditional views of Iro, from comic to tragic and from sane to mad, but it also situated the meaning of the character’s actions within the discourses of seventeenth­century Academicians. The argument was that the bodily sensuality of the insane glutton Iro needed to be eradicated (through his "tragic" and "culminating suicide") to allow the rational and virtuous love of Ulisse and Penelope to succeed, whereas, in Monteverdi’s "sister" opera Poppea, it was the rational and virtuous Seneca who had to commit suicide in order for the sensuous Nero and Poppea to triumph. For Rosand, Iro was thus a "moral exemplum," part of a binary opposition that drove home the ethical point and demonstrated that Monteverdi was "a debater far exceeding any letterato." This present paper will re­examine these issues. First, it will claim that Iro’s character­type is comic rather than tragic, and that Rosand’s use of Giulio Strozzi’s definition of the "Hilarode"­type of role and its supposed implications for "giocoso" characters needs re­evaluation. Second, it will argue that there is no evidence that Iro actually does commit suicide. Third, it will show that such an act, in any case, would not confirm his "tragic" status since there was already a strong tradition of "comic" suicides in the theatre (for example in works by Angelo Beolco, whose influence on musico­theatrical works has, so far, been neglected). Fourth, that Iro’s music, even in his final "lament’ has many links to comic or light, "non­lamenting" traditions—as, for example, in the opening walking bass (found in the 1607 Scherzi musicali) and Iro’s "ciaccona" refrain. Fifth, that the diagnosis of Iro as "mad" does not seem fully to comply with the historical conventions of "the mad" in opera. And finally, that Monteverdi was fundamentally a "dramatist" rather than a "debater" and that therefore we may need to re­focus some of our methodologies for reading the dramaturgy of seventeenth­century opera.

Il Nerone impasticciato: The Lover and the Tyrant in the Characterization of Nero in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea Beth Szczepanski (The Ohio State University) Ambiguities in the seemingly amoral plot of Gian Francesco Busenello and Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea have led scholars to develop a number of opposing interpretations. Previous studies have focused primarily on Poppea, Seneca, and Octavia as carriers of the works’ moral message. In this paper I examine the characterization of Nero to argue for a bivalent moral interpretation of this work. Through comparison of Busenello’s historical sources—the writings of Cornelius Tacitus, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, and Cassius Dio—with representative musical and poetic passages of the opera, I will show that the operatic Nero incorporates two characters of contrasting morality, the operatic lover, conveyed primarily through Busenello’s text, and the historical tyrant, conveyed largely through Monteverdi’s setting of that text. While the ancient historians portray Nero as an exhibitionistic, effeminate, childish, and murderous despot, Busenello downplays these negative characteristics to such a degree that Nero’s misdeeds, such as forcing Seneca to commit suicide and exiling Octavia, can be viewed as actions of an ardent lover rather than those of a tyrant. The most tyrannical acts of the historical Nero are either omitted entirely or simply mentioned in passing. Monteverdi, however, characterizes Nero as the historians described him, rearranging Busenello’s text and using a nearly hysterical form of stile concitato to emphasize the emperor’s incompetence and lack of self­control. Moreover, the role is most virtuosic when Nero is most tyrannical; Nero’s musicianship was a negative trait in the eyes of historians. By creating this ambivalent Nero, Busenello and Monteverdi provided their Venetian audience not with a morality tale, but rather with a titillating story that invited the viewer either to cheer for the inevitable triumph of Love—likely a popular choice in Venice during Carnival—or to take heart in the eventual downfall of the tryant. The same choice faces audiences and scholars today. Those who choose the former read the opera as a celebration of hedonism, and those who choose the latter read it as a censure of the political and personal transgressions carried out by Nero in his quest for amorous fulfillment.

Felice Ottavia: Taming the Vindictive Queen of L’incoronazione di Poppea Patricia H. Firca (The University of Chicago)

Focusing on Busenello’s distortion of Ottavia’s historical character, this paper re­examines the "irrational" behavior of the psychotic queen of L’incoronazione di Poppea by revisiting one of the opera’s sources, the pseudo­Senecan play Octavia. The intertextuality with the fabula praetexta (hitherto dismissed or ignored) suggests that Ottavia’s second­ act transformation into a "monster" can be seen less as her proto­feminist empowering in the midst of a mid­seventeenth­century Venetian patriarchal society, and more as a caricature of theatrical elements already present in the Roman play. Yet in pushing history and providing Ottavia too truculent a posture, Busenello opened the door for a growing wave of sympathy for her character. A study of the opera’s (somewhat neglected) Neapolitan version further problematizes the second transformation of Ottavia, from "monster" into "martyr," specifically a martyr of love. While this tempering of Ottavia’s character can be explained by the political context of mid­seventeenth­century Naples, it also stands at the beginning of a later process of taming the vindictive queen of L’incoronazione, in an attempt to work her character out of the literary impasse into which Busenello had locked her. Indeed, the Ottavia felice of operas from the 1690s and 1700s witnesses not only an increased preoccupation with the convention of the lieto fine, but also the fascination that her character continued to exert on early modern audiences. Significantly, the reworking of Ottavia into a virtuous queen represents not a silencing of her voice, but the pursuit of a "rescue agenda" on behalf of an ultimately popular protagonist.

La virtù de’ strali d’Amore by Giovanni Faustini and Francesco Cavalli (1642) as a Contribution to Contemporary Operatic Debate Hendrik Schulze (Universität Salzburg)

The opera based on Giovanni Faustini's first libretto La virtù de' strali d'Amore was first performed in 1642, a time when Venetian opera still was in its formative years. The aesthetics of opera were widely discussed in prefaces to other librettos by authors such as Giacomo Badoaro and Gian Francesco Busenello, as well as in the Venetian academies, most notoriously in the Accademia degli Incogniti. Faustini seems not to have been a member of the Incogniti, nor did he take part in their debates—the preface of La virtù is concerned with different matters. But a closer look at the opera itself reveals a text that contributes to the ongoing debate. The allegory is directly opposed to the one propagated by Badoaro in Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640). There Human Frailty is shown as subject to Fortune, Time, and Love; in La virtù, humans can take their fate into their own hands. A passage directly alluding to Il ritorno emphasizes the discursive function of allegory in La virtù. Faustini also opposed the Incogniti's emphasis on epic models by establishing a new dramaturgy oriented more toward the drama. Instead of Badoaro's single protagonist, Faustini built his drama upon the relationships of four equally important characters, thus rejecting inflexible allegory in favor of the more variable love intrigue. The resulting narrative is more dialogue­based, and therefore more dramatic. La virtù offers insight into the development of opera from an angle different from that of the Incogniti. The ideas of Incogniti members were much publicized, but they do not represent the full picture of Venetian operatic development. Although never codified, Faustini's ideas proved much more successful in the long term. Return to top MUSIC AND DEVOTION

"What devil’s Pater noster mumbles she?": The Sounds and Music of Witchcraft in Early­Modern English Broadside Balladry Sarah F. Williams (Northwestern University)

The witch craze in early modern England produced a multitude of artistic representations on the subject from countless dramatic works to broadside ballads and consort songs. Ben Jonson described the music of witches to be "confused noyse" accompanied by "spindells, timbrells, rattles and other [infernal] instruments" (Ben Jonson, Masque of Queens). Other literary and musical representations feature witches "mumbling," "swearing" and spewing gibberish and profanities. The studies charting sound spaces and the threat of noise in early modern Europe in recent years have neglected perhaps one of the most interesting acoustic phenomena of the era—that is, the aural qualities of witches as performed in the early modern representational arts. This study will examine the acoustic properties of witches and witchcraft in the most popular and prolific art form of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras—the broadside ballad. Dozens of witchcraft ballads were produced during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England, and most describe the aural and even musical qualities of their demonic characters. The accompanying tunes to these early modern musical "newspapers" often became associated with certain ballad subjects and could thus reinforce or subvert the ballad’s message. Just as the tune "Fortune my Foe" became associated with murder and execution ballads, certain tunes appear more frequently with ballads describing witches, wayward women, and pacts with the devil. Common tunes, coupled with descriptions of the witches’ speech patterns and "unnatural" sounds, offer us a window into early modern attitudes about these women and their powers.

Awarded the Irene Alm Memorial Prize for 2005 Culture and Ceremony in the Wedding Motets of Jacob Praetorius Esther Criscuola de Laix (University of California, Berkeley)

All but three of the eleven known motets of Jacob Praetorius (1586­1651), organist at the church of St. Jacobi in Hamburg, are wedding motets, composed on commission for the weddings of family and friends. They thus fall into the category of "occasional music" or "ceremonial music," and both their opulent musical characteristics and luxurious printed format mark them as such. Except for Frederick Kent Gable’s edition (RRMBE, vol. 73), these motets have received little scholarly attention. I aim to explore the active roles they play within their cultural and ceremonial context. Praetorius’s wedding music was part of an intricate ceremonial complex surrounding marriage and weddings in early modern Hamburg. These pieces, grandly presented in both notes and print, were not simply ornaments for wedding ceremonies. Each one was a token of personal alliances, actualizing the new relationship between bride and groom and the relationship of Jacob Praetorius with both. Each was a social document, placing bride, groom, wedding, and music in a larger socio­ cultural order. Most importantly, the music of Praetorius’s eight wedding motets embody the ceremonial of the early­modern Lutheran wedding in Hamburg, particularly in their sometimes­gendered disposition of quasi­ alternating polyphonic and homophonic textures—so often written off as "typical" for music of this period. All these aspects, encapsulated within this small repertory, paint a vibrant and vital picture of music, society, and culture in early modern Hamburg.

The Emperor’s Voice: Style, Structure and Meaning in a Motet from the Habsburg Court of Ferdinand III (1637­57) Andrew H. Weaver (Northwestern University)

The early 1640s was a disastrous time for the Austrian Habsburgs, marking an inexorable turning point in the Thirty Years’ War (1618­48). In late 1642, shortly after a crushing military defeat, one of the star members of the imperial chapel, Giovanni Felice Sances, published a motet book featuring a number of pieces that spoke directly to the tribulations of the time. This paper examines one of these works, the four­ voice "Audi Domine," exploring how Sances’s music conveyed an important message to Ferdinand’s subjects, seemingly straight from the emperor’s mouth. On one hand, Sances’s motet is a powerful work of universal appeal, using a wide range of styles as well as unexpected changes within an otherwise predictable structural framework to project a sense of confident optimism, despite the entirely dolorous and uncertain text. On the other hand, however, Sances also tailored the motet specifically for the immediate political situation. In its original Biblical context, the text is a prayer spoken by King Solomon. Through a variety of musical means, Sances’s motet allows for an identification of the Old Testament monarch with Ferdinand III; the work thereby gives listeners the impression of hearing the emperor’s voice speaking directly to them, delivering a message of comfort, hope, and unwavering faith in God. Musicology has long aimed to answer the question, "How does music speak to us?" This paper demonstrates the possibilities available to us, if we broaden this question to "Who is speaking to us, and why?"

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